


Lovers in Hell

by Marasa



Category: Twenty One Pilots
Genre: Blood, Blood Kink, Brainwashing, Depression, Hunting, M/M, Murder, Road Trip, Sex, Soulmates, True Love, Vampires, Vampirism, Virus
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 04:21:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13138965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Marasa/pseuds/Marasa
Summary: They're in the belly of the 48th, baking in a car caked in desert dust parked in a strip mall parking lot.“Babyyyy…” Tyler drawls, bored and tired with the Arizona heat. “Let's get out of this god-forsaken state already.”





	Lovers in Hell

**Author's Note:**

> What have the boys been up to since 'Drumstick'?

Josh is sweating through his shirt.

Under his arms, down his sides, his back, his neck. The map in his grip is wrinkling in his sweaty palms, almost drenched.

109*F the temperature reads on the screen by the rear view mirror.

He leans back against the passenger seat and groans.

He groans even louder as the sweaty heat of Tyler’s head pushes against his as he leans over to Josh and presses their temples together.

“Babyyyy…” Tyler drawls, bored and tired with the Arizona heat. “Let's get out of this god-forsaken state already.”

They're in the belly of the 48th, baking in a car caked in desert dust parked in a strip mall parking lot. The area recalls a sense of familiarity.

It's shitty and mostly abandoned and eerily similar to the last strip mall Josh found himself in maybe two months ago. That's when Tyler had taken the name ‘Zach,’ when Josh had tasted the honey of the gods for the first time, or maybe the wine of demons.

They've been on the road for a while. Never once has it been a bad experience.

They bathe each other in gas station bathrooms with pink liquid soap and wet paper towels. They have sex in the backseat until the fabric is damp with sweat and semen and drool and tears. They sleep on the side of the road, in the tall grass, on nights of good weather and pick ticks off of each other come morning.

It's more than Josh could ever want out of life.

Tyler is bouncing on his dick one night in the backseat when they're parked beneath a water tower in Oregon, when he tilts his head back and gasps out, “I don't ever want to stop driving.”

Josh holds his thighs open and thrusts hard up into him as he answers back, “Then let's never stop.”

They cum together with thoughts of the open road on their minds.

There's no end in sight. They take turns driving on major highways and on dusty backroads overtaken by darkness- straight shots, loop de loops, random squiggles all over the USA until they're hitting almost every state.

Josh keeps a map in the glove compartment and doodles the highlights of their brief stays in each state they've visited.

He scribbles a dog in the state lines of Iowa in remembrance of the mutt that followed them around the perimeter of a gas station closely.

Josh petted him at one point and got fleas all over his hand and pants, and left with pinpoint bites all over his arms that Tyler had to wash away with a bottle of vodka that they finished later in an Iowa forest off the side of a backwoods road.

He doodles a Nerds Rope inside North Dakota as he remembers just another perfect night.

They had bought eight of them and sat on the hood of the car outside of a Waffle House. Tyler’s mouth was attached to one end and Josh’s was attached the other and without any hurry, the pair had chomped on the sweet candy under the night sky until their sticky lips met in the middle.

He draws a condom on fire inside the shape of Utah to commemorate the time they bought ten cent condoms from a vending machine in a strip club bathroom.

‘ _The Undeniable Pleasure of Pure Heat! - Condoms Covered in Self-Heating Lube_ ’ the sign read and despite their usual dismissal of any protection, they coughed up a dime because they were just so curious.

Only ten minutes into their lovemaking, they began to wince and comment about how much it was heating up, how surely it should cool down because it's getting too hot, wait, this really burns, ow, shit, fuck.

That night, Josh massaged Tyler’s burning hole with frigid fingertips while Tyler held Josh’s fiery cock in his cold hands. Neither of them came that night but they weren't down about it; their pained laughter made the night somehow enjoyable.

They’re deep in Arizona as Josh draws a sun surrounded in violent inky rays inside the outline of the state.

There’s nothing else to attribute to such a place as this, he thinks.

Tyler licks away a bead of sweat inching down his temple. “Let’s get out of here, Joshie.”

Josh folds up the wet map and stores it back in the dashboard. He looks through the dusty windshield to where the sun is beginning to set just behind the liquor store in front of them. The sky is ablaze with the color of fire and flame.

Josh can’t stop sweating.

And it seems like he’s not the only one.

A man emerges from the liquor store just as the sun finally sets, a brown paper bag in his hand and a red shirt soaked with sweat hanging heavily on him. He’s breathing hard the hot air, chest inflating, deflating, back rising, falling.

Even from here, Josh can see the way his neck twitches. He can see the way his jugular swells under the red ink of a tattoo of a naked devil woman on the side of his neck.

“Not before dinner,” Josh murmurs as he's realizes just how hungry he really is.

Tyler follows his gaze. He smiles crookedly. “Of course, my love.”

Their respective doors slamming behind them is the only sound to arise from this empty strip mall in the middle of nowhere. The desert must be reclaiming the island of asphalt- the grit of a hefty film of sand scrapes the bottom of their shoes and the hot air sucks their lungs empty of any breath.

The lovers stumble through the parking lot drenched in red neon light from the liquor store sign to the only other soul that is on this hellish stretch of concrete.

“Drinking alone?”

The man turns from the closed door of the driver’s side of his car, gaze shifting from the punk to the one who addressed him.

The man raises an eyebrow. “On a night like this, why not?”

“Too hot to be drinking alone,” Tyler says with a considerate frown.

“Too sad,” Josh says seriously.

They don’t have a script but they know to say. Josh wonders if somehow the virus changed his brain when it made him immortal. It’s as if his subconscious has earned a voice that is steady and smooth.

He doesn’t know what will fall from his tongue but he trusts that whatever it will be will be perfect. He and Tyler are on the same page, always, playing off each other with awe-inspiring ease.

Tyler calls it, ‘The Hunter’s Fluency.’

The man with the buzzcut hair and bags under his eyes blinks softly at them. “Y-Yeah, okay.”

And just like that, their words are already working.

He shucks off the paper from the bottle of whiskey in his hand and uncaps it. The smell is strong between the three of them. Not the alcohol, but the sweetness of Josh and Tyler’s breath as they exhale through parted lips discreetly.

The man is about to tilt the bottle to his own mouth but stops suddenly, nostrils flaring, eyes subtly going wider, pupils following suit. He slowly lowers the bottle and looks at them softly, warmly, as if he’s suddenly tripping, and he kinda is.

Hunting has changed. They’ve learned more about what works and what doesn’t. They find themselves to be more capable of things they never before thought possible.

It’s through pure will that they slowly drug the man with their presence.

“To new friends,” the man says without any concept of what he is saying as he refuses the first sip of alcohol and instead holds it out to the strange pair. “To my dearests hosts.”

Josh takes the bottle with a smile and tilts it back into his mouth. He passes it over to Tyler, who takes two liberal sips.

They hand the alcohol back to the man and come to stand on either side of him as he takes a drink himself. He gulps, gulps, gulps and emerges from a sea of liquid copper gasping.

He pants and leans against Josh’s shoulder, so obviously seeking comfort from the kindest of the two.

His hesitance is gone, his mind is already slipping. It's truth and honesty that moves the stranger, a lack of shame and fear.

Josh brings his hand up to the man’s cheek to hold him gently to his shoulder. Tyler steps closer behind him and places an attentive hand on his back between his shoulder blades.

They can smell his bitter breath and can hear the pump of the blood in his veins and it's enough for Tyler to drool against the back of the man’s neck and for Josh to drool in his hair and against his scalp.

They always get like this, soft and gentle, as their body prepares so readily for death.

It’s almost as if they want them.

Josh and Tyler are the end, the mouth of Gehenna that will gnash bones and flesh but strangers are always falling into their arms readily.

The pair welcome them with growling stomachs and deep understanding.

“‘The Call of the Void,’” Josh coos as he lays his head atop the other man’s, bristly hair wet with his own saliva feeling like toothbrush bristles under his cheek. “Does that mean anything to you?”

The man chokes a dry sob.

“I know,” Josh soothes.

“We both know,” Tyler says.

“All I ever wanted was someone to love me.” With every word the man speaks, the smiling devil on his neck bops up and down. “No one ever loved me.”

“We’re here now,” Josh says as he holds the man closer. Tyler pushes his chest up against the man’s back, a lamb secured willingly between the bodies of lions.

The man whimpers and grapples weakly at them. He's making the noise of someone who is so beautifully finished and then he's going lax, quiet, not asleep but pleasantly high on the natural pheromones the other two men emit.

“First sip, Josh,” Tyler says and Josh has no choice but to blush deeply because the first sip is so sacred and so desired and for Tyler to give it up to him just shows how much he indeed loves him.

Josh kisses the copious saliva from Tyler’s lips tenderly before leaning down and kissing at the sleepy pulse under the lips of a devil girl.

Josh is the first sip, Tyler is the second.

Their tongues curl around each other’s deep in the bleeding gash they've torn into the flesh below them. The fire in their bellies quells with each mouthful that is more intoxicating than whiskey.

“Thank you,” the man gurgles with a blissed smile on his face and the lovers seal their lips together once again, both of them holding the relaxing body upright.

Sometimes they want to keep them alive.

Josh more so than Tyler.

He's so sensitive, sentimental is what Tyler says. Tyler isn't mean about it; if anything, he admires Josh’s humanity as it reminds him to call upon his own.

Tonight, Josh feels vaguely sentimental with the remnants of the man’s words drifting through his mind and how familiar they sound.

This stranger could be like them, alive forever, indestructible, perhaps better despite the fact that they both still have hard days.

Josh’s lips stutter as he falls victim to hesitance and an overactive mind but then Tyler is squeezing his hand without even coming up from the gore of the their meal’s throat.

In that gentle squeeze is a reminder that this existence is a curse, an eternal sentence, a damnation and not only that, they'd also have to take care of a new vampire and they don’t have the patience to sit around for a week in Hell.

Josh joins his love back deep between shredded flesh and warm arteries.

They don't worry about cleaning up after themselves as they drop the limp corpse onto the pavement. There's no cameras, no one else here.

Three out of the four stores here are abandoned and the only man working inside of the small liquor store isn't going to say a word, not when the pair with blood dripping from their mouths stare at him, pupils bleeding past their irises and filling their entire eyes as they implant a single assurance into the man who stares transfixed: ‘ _All is fine_.’

The man nods slowly. He turns back to the register sleepily and doesn't look up again.

“Let's get out of here,” Tyler says as they walk back to the car. He leans up against the hood, sheds his shirt and wipes his mouth with the material. “This heat is sucking the energy from me and the sun set like an hour ago.”

Josh takes the map from the dashboard and stands beside the shirtless man. He uncaps the pen as Tyler wipes his mouth for him and scribbles out the sun because there is more to Arizona than the heat, he's only now realized.

There is sadness and hurt and the desire to be loved.

There is also the truest love of two soulmates to ever be fashioned by the universe. There is blood behind their teeth and gasoline fumes in their noses and the rush of a never ending journey for two men who are the end of everything.

This is how it will be anywhere they go next. Tyler says he wants to go back to Oregon, says they could waste some time in Nevada, says that California is nothing to write home about.

Josh wants to go to Texas, hears Austin’s cool. He wants to go to Florida too, so they can go to Disney World. He'd like to go to Tennessee, lose himself in the music.

They’d both like to be wherever the other is, forever and always.

Tyler presses a kiss to the side of Josh’s neck as Josh draws two devil horns and a heart inside the black fence of Arizona.


End file.
